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NY TIMES BLASTED FOR GIVING FORUM TO WHITE NATIONALIST PROPAGANDA FROM CIS SHILL! — “The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science ‘research’ papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language.”

Sebastian Murdock
Senior Reporter
HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-times-anti-immigration-op-ed-hate-group_n_5e21d9d8c5b673621f752f9c

The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank, is categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

BY SEBASTIAN MURDOCK

SENIOR REPORTER

HIUFFPOST

The New York Times published an op-ed decrying immigration by an author claiming to be a “liberal restrictionist” who is in fact attached to a known hate group.

The column, published Friday, was written by , “a senior research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies,” according to the biography listed under his byline.

CIS, which calls itself “an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization,” is a known hate group that has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-immigrant movement that hires racist writers and associates with white nationalists.

“I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” Kammer’s headline reads. The piece begins with an anecdote about how immigrants take the jobs of American-born workers and later claims “many liberal Democrats” want illegal immigration to run rampant:

Now many liberal Democrats, including those who call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seek to erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Under the banner of inclusiveness, equality, human rights, racial reconciliation and reparations for American interventions in the third world, those liberals demand sanctuary for those who make it past the Border Patrol or overstay a visa. Few speak openly of open borders, but that is essentially what they are calling for.

Throughout the piece, Kammer seems set on reminding readers that he is liberal, even if his views might suggest otherwise.

“That’s why I call myself a liberal restrictionist,” Kammer, a former journalist, writes. “I have long considered myself a moderate liberal, in part because Democrats have always been the allies of working people.”

White House adviser Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, has cited CIS when speaking about immigration, and in 2011, the group released a report attempting to connect immigration with the creation of future terrorists, calling them “terror babies.”

The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science “research” papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language. According to the SPLC, “longtime CIS executive director Mark Krikorian’s contributions to the immigration policy debate rarely rise above petulant commentary dashed with extremist statements.”

Running a column by an author employed by a known hate group is the latest in the Times’s run of publishing racist pieces in its opinion section. In December, columnist and known bedbug Bret Stephens cited a study by a white nationalist that falsely claimed Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ than other races. The study he cited “traffics in centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes,” according to the SPLC.

Do better, New York Times.

****************

Ben Mathis-Lilley
Chief News Blogger
SLATE

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/times-op-ed-white-nationalist-center-for-immigration-studies.html

THE SLATEST

Times Taps White Nationalist Organization for Thought-Provoking Perspective on Immigration

By BEN MATHIS-LILLEY

JAN 17, 20206:42 PM

The New York Times opinion section under editor James Bennet ostensibly aims to challenge the paper’s predominately liberal readers by presenting them with thoughtful critiques of their worldview. In practice, it runs pieces like this recent argument that launching a war against Iran would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East—which was written by a veteran of the Bush administration who had predicted confidently in a 2003 piece also published by the Times that launching a war against Iraq would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East. There was no acknowledgment in the new piece of the old one, as an opinion section committed to intellectual honesty might require, nor was it particularly challenging in the sense of being difficult to rebut. But it did make people on the left feel bad, and like they were losing their minds, which is the bar that Bennet’s section requires an argument to clear.

The essay “I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” published in the Times Thursday, may represent the nadir of this approach. It makes a familiar argument: that “the left” believes in a “post-national” system of open borders which sacrifices the interests of native-born working Americans to the interests of low-skilled foreign immigrants who drive down wages and disrupt the cultural cohesiveness of their communities. It argues for respecting a distinction between legal and illegal immigration and asserts that Donald Trump’s position on immigration can be appreciated, in a non-racist way, as “a patriotic battle to defend common people.” It accuses Trump’s critics of having had their minds addled by “tribal passions” and a fetish for conflict “between ethnic groups,” and it proposes a “conciliatory” policy that would offer amnesty to existing undocumented workers but institute a crackdown regime of visa enforcement that would prevent future undocumented individuals from finding jobs.

The familiarity of the article’s arguments is matched by the familiarity of its flaws. While large-scale immigration is, in fact, believed by some non-racists to flatten wages at the bottom of the pay scale, it’s also known to accelerate rather than retard economic expansion overall, and tends to be supported by progressives who advocate for other means of increasing working-class wages and sharing the benefits of GDP growth. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration is not some ancient, race-agnostic pillar of global affairs, but rather a concept that was instituted in the United States in the early 20th century to explicitly discriminate against Asian, southern European, and eastern European individuals and expanded in the 1960s to explicitly discriminate against Mexicans. Trump’s support is strongest in areas where there are fewer undocumented immigrants, not more, and he lost four of the five states that have the highest undocumented populations per capita. Many of the most immigration-heavy and ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. are also the safest and wealthiest and are considered so desirable to live in by migrating native-born Americans that they are experiencing housing crises.

As to whether criticizing an administration that instituted the premeditated, systematic separation of young children from their parents after they applied legally for asylum is a matter of unseemly “tribal passions,” or whether support for the principles of inclusive American citizenship described on the Statue of Liberty constitutes “post-national” anti-patriotism, perhaps we can agree to disagree.

More concerning than any of these specific problems, though, is the piece’s provenance: It’s written by someone named Jerry Kammer, a fellow at a think tank called the Center for Immigration Studies. Kammer has made a career out of covering immigration policy, he writes, for two reasons: “I was fascinated by its human, political and moral complexity. I also wanted to push back against the campaign by activist groups to label restrictionism as inherently racist.” He expresses regret that “odious people” with white-power affiliations have given the cause of cutting back on immigration a “bad name.”

What neither Kammer nor the Times discloses is that the Center for Immigration Studies was in fact founded by these people, most prominent among them a white nationalist named John Tanton who died last year. Tanton, as the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, believed that the United States needed to maintain a “European-American majority, and a clear one at that”; he founded CIS, he wrote in the 1980s, in order to give his ideas the appearance of independent “credibility.”

Kammer does write that he disagrees with “some of the center’s hard-line positions.” Among his more hard-line colleagues at CIS are a writer named Jason Richwine, who contributed to a journal founded by white supremacist Richard Spencer and who has said that “IQ” is the “most important” difference between racial groups. (As the SPLC has documented, CIS has circulated literally hundreds of articles by explicit white supremacists like Spencer via links in its weekly newsletter. Its director once accused Barack Obama of trying to “foment race war.”) A statement of purpose on the CIS website is credited to longtime Tanton collaborator Dan Stein, who once complained that mass immigration was a tool developed by “Ted Kennedy and his political allies” in approximately 1958 to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.”

In 1997, the Wall Street Journal wrote about Tanton in a piece called “The Intellectual Roots of Nativism.” It was a scathing article which noted that Tanton had once described the immigrant’s contribution to society as “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” The piece expressed concern that “otherwise sober-minded conservatives” and “reasonable critics of immigration” were affiliating themselves with his ideas. The author of that WSJ article, a 28-year-old journalist named Tucker Carlson, has since made the career-advancing decision to embrace Tanton-style nativism; he was in the news not too long ago for complaining in his role as a Fox News host that immigrants make the United States physically “dirtier.”

Whatever space ever existed between mainstream conservatism and white-power nationalism, Carlson demonstrates, has collapsed. And it turns out that the “odious people” that Kammer references in the Times are actually his colleagues and forebears, who created his organization so that policies intended to perpetuate “European-American” and “Anglo-Saxon” superiority could be laundered into the respectable discourse. What else is there to say but: It worked!

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So, we have a White Nationalist in the White House assisted by neo-Nazi advisor Stephen Miller actually turning nativism into “Government policy.” Other white supremacists are scattered in key positions throughout the Government, particularly the immigration bureaucracy. Trump tweets and right-wing media put out a constant barrage of nativist lies, misrepresentations, false narratives, and racial, ethnic, and religious slurs.

So, just why is it that the “mainstream media” owes White Nationalists yet another forum to spread their nativist propaganda?

It’s not limited, of course, to just the Times. The WashPost regularly publishes largely fact and value free right-wing blather from professional shills like Marc Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt under the guise of “op-eds.”

And Chuck Todd regularly invites GOP congenital liars and Trump toadies like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to spread their lies, false narratives, and debunked “conspiracy theories” from the “bully pulpit” of “Meet the Press.” To top it off, Chuck then appears to be flabbergasted that when he confronts these guys with truth and facts, they “double down” continuing to lie to his face, ignore established facts, and spread Putinesque conspiracy theories.

Fact is, most of the Trump agenda is corrupt, counterfactual, unethical, inhumane, divisive, and corrosive to American democracy. We receive enough of it from lots of sources every day, pretty much 24-7-365. Is it really necessary for those supposedly dedicated to truth and democracy to give more free “air time” to nativist shills spreading their racially corrosive, divisive, anti-democracy propaganda?

PWS

01-18-20

POLITICS: DANIEL DENVIR @ LITERARY HUB: The Case Against Immigration Centrism – Liberals Inevitably Get Co-Opted Into “Nativism Lite” & The Result Is Donald Trump & His Overtly White Nationalist GOP!

https://apple.news/ASCSwefgISM2mLjzRVdJeWQ

When It Comes to Immigration, Political Centrism is Useless

With Trump in office, things can seem absurdly bleak. But after Republicans lost the House, it became clear that Trump’s first two years were for nativists a critical opportunity to reshape the contours of the American demos. And they blew it: Republicans had total control of government yet legislative cuts to legal immigration went nowhere. Meanwhile, Democratic voters are moving sharply left in the face of accelerating Republican extremism. The percentage of Americans calling for a decrease in legal immigration has plummeted since the early 2000s—particularly but not exclusively among Democrats. Indeed, since 2006 Democratic voters have swung from a strong plurality supporting legal immigration cuts to a stronger plurality backing increased legal immigration.

In promoting attacks on “illegal immigration” and militarizing the border, establishment politicians from both major parties inflamed popular anti-immigrant sentiment. But they helped move the Overton window so far right that it snapped loose of its bipartisan frame, prompting vociferous resistance on the left. The war on “illegal immigrants” was based on a bipartisan consensus. It is becoming very partisan. That’s good.

As nativists well know, immigration means that we the people is increasingly made up of people who don’t look like Trump and his base. And they correctly worry that immigration is driving a large-scale demographic transformation that could ultimately doom the conservative movement—a prospect that the most honestly racist figures on the far-right call “white genocide.” Non-white people disproportionately vote Democrat—a trend gravely exacerbated by unconstrained Republican racism that has alienated even wealthy and economically conservative non-white people. Demographics aren’t destiny. But thanks to the foundational role that racism plays in American capitalism, they do mean quite a bit.

In August 2019, Trump finally implemented an aggressive attack on legal immigration, expanding the definition of what makes an immigrant “likely to become a public charge” and thus excludable from the country.28 The rule further empowers immigration officers to deny entry to poor and working-class immigrants, particularly from Latin America, or to deny immigrants already in the country a green card. The rule radically expands a provision of US immigration law dating back to the Immigration Act of 1882 and, before that, to New York and Massachusetts’s enforcement targeting Irish paupers. The Migration Policy Institute predicts that the rule “could cause a significant share of the nearly 23 million noncitizens and U.S. citizens in immigrant families using public benefits to disenroll.” And visa denials under Trump had already skyrocketed before the new rule was in place.

It is unclear how profoundly the rule will reshape either the size or the class, national, and racial makeup of legal immigration. But regardless, the new rule is a reflection of Trump’s inability to secure cuts or changes to legal immigration in Congress. The rule will very likely be rolled back under even a milquetoast Democratic president. The same holds true with Trump’s deep cuts to refugee admissions, and the draconian proposal pushed by some in his orbit to cut admissions to zero. Trump is effectively terrorizing migrants in the present but failing to secure the enduring legislative change that would outlast his presidency.

There is no majority constituency today for enacting such legislation—nor any viable institutional vehicle for it. Whatever opportunity existed to leverage a white-grievance-fueled presidency toward a full nativist program has faded even as the right clings to power thanks to the system’s profoundly anti-democratic features. The left is nowhere near winning. But it is at long last emerging as a real force in clear conflict with both the Trumpist right and the center that facilitated its rise.

For Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Biden, Feinstein, Schumer, and a host of other Democrats, a measure of nativism was useful. Quite a bit more than that has proven necessary for Republicans. But too much nativism is a problem: no rational capitalist favors shutting out exploitable migrant labor. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, political stances that seem rooted in principle are in reality founded—if often in indirect, unconscious, and obscure ways—in “material conditions of existence.” This is no doubt the case here.

The United States has undergone decades of enforcement escalation, fashioning a useful scapegoat for neoliberalism and empire while maintaining a segmented labor market. But business frequently lost too, most spectacularly with the repeated defeat of comprehensive immigration reform. Business wants the undocumented to be legalized and guest workers who provide the benefits of undocumented labor without the risk. But what perhaps best reflects—but by no means exclusively reflects—the power of business is what hasn’t happened: deep legislative cuts to authorized immigration have been consistently off the table for more than two decades. This has been the case since the 1996 legislation to slash legal immigration was defeated in favor of a law to persecute undocumented immigrants and “criminal aliens.” The immigration debate has taken on a bizarre and contradictory life of its own. The unspeakability of cuts to authorized immigration, and the failure to impose effective employer sanctions and employment verification systems reveal that immigration policy was still tethered, narrowly but firmly, to the interests of capital. With Trump, full nativism is spoken. But substantial immigration reductions still cannot pass Congress.

A full examination of the complex role of business, the rich, and their various factions during the past two decades of immigration politics is yet to be written. Some of its basic contours, however, are clear. For one, the capitalist class has become recklessly polyphonic. Lumpen-billionaires like the Mercer family and the Koch brothers have spent vast amounts to promote their ideologically distinct priorities rather than those of the collective. The Tanton network is a case in point: it received more than $150 million since 2005 from the Colcom Foundation, founded by the late Mellon heir Cordelia Scaife May. Ironically, independent right-wing oligarchs who pursue idiosyncratic agendas now rival the Chamber of Commerce for influence thanks to the policy achievements of groups like the Chamber of Commerce, which helped those oligarchs make and keep their billions. But does establishment big business even care about immigration anymore?

Political scientist Margaret Peters argues that productivity gains and globalization’s facilitation of an overseas supply of low-wage labor has led to a lessening of business’s need for immigrant workers, resulting in more restriction. The evidence for this, however, is mixed. On the one hand, business has not won a major legislative expansion of immigration since 1990. But it has also not suffered a major defeat. What’s clear is that business can tolerate border security theatrics and the demonization of “criminal aliens,” and is content to exploit undocumented workers. As anthropologist Nicholas De Genova writes, “It is deportability, and not deportation per se, that has historically rendered undocumented migrant labor a distinctly disposable commodity.”34 Business opposes dramatic cuts to authorized immigration, effective employer sanctions, and mandatory employee verification. Business prefers legalization, but that doesn’t rival priorities like tax cuts and deregulation; if it did, business would abandon the Republican Party. The roles played in immigration politics by business interests with various and often bipartisan attachments require further research, which will in turn help to clarify the woefully under-studied sociology of ruling class power more generally.

Meanwhile, business’s hold on the Democratic Party has come under intense assault. The war on “illegal immigrants” that accelerated in the 1990s is facilitating a realignment of left-of-center politics in favor of a diverse, immigrant-inclusive working class in opposition to war, neoliberal oligarchy, and hard borders. The post–Cold War dominance of carceral neoliberalism had made such a popular coalition impossible; the exhaustion of that model signaled by the 2008 crisis has made it astonishingly credible. Record deportations and a radicalizing racist right triggered a revolt among the Democratic Party’s young and increasingly diverse base. That base has along with much of American public opinion moved to perhaps the most staunchly pro-immigrant position in American history—and, in doing so, toward a radically inclusive vision of the American working class. Amid a post-Recession boom in labor militancy, that portends trouble for the entire political establishment and the racist and oligarchic order it protects.

Trump’s election set that trajectory into overdrive, rendering opinions on immigration a basic proxy for one’s partisan allegiance. Border militarization that once garnered bipartisan support is now the polarizing Wall. Obama’s brutal migrant detention centers have under Trump been labeled “concentration camps.” The number of Republicans who believe that the United States risks losing its national identity if the country welcomes immigrants from the world over has increased since Trump’s election.35 At the same time, Democrats have become more hostile to enforcement. In 2010, 47 percent of Democrats said that they equally prioritized a pathway to legalizing undocumented immigrants and “better border security and stronger enforcement of immigration laws,” while just 29 percent prioritized a pathway to legalization alone. By 2018, the number prioritizing legalization alone skyrocketed to 51 percent. As the war on immigrants kicked into high gear in 1994, just 32 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of Republicans agreed that immigrants strengthened the country. By 2016, the share of Democrats who said so had surged to 78 percent.

Extreme polarization, the establishment’s bête noire, is in fact the only solution to the long-standing bipartisan agreement that immigration is a problem for enforcement to solve. Demanded and rejected, oppressed and expelled, this country’s many others have long insisted that the promise of American freedom, designed for if never truly delivered to white settlers, belongs to them too because they too are the people. And contrary to what Trump’s presidency might suggest, a growing number of Americans agree and are turning against nativism and war. Racism is, as the remarkable number of Americans embracing socialism understand, an obstacle to freeing everyone.

The issue of borders is, in turn, a simple one in principle for socialists: borders are a nationalist enterprise and thus incompatible with an internationalist workers’ creed. Migration is a symptom of social violence when it is compelled by poverty, war, or climate change. But moving to faraway and strange places is often a beautiful journey too, one nurtured by love, adventure, and the drive for self-determination and realization. Migration should be free and the choice to migrate should be freely made. The border does not protect Americans against cultural change, economic insecurity, and terrorism. It bolsters a system of global inequality that harms people everywhere by dividing them.

Even with public opinion moving rapidly to our side, border controls will not fall anytime soon. To chip away at them, we must understand their historical particularity. The legal right to travel was, for most white people, a basic one for much of American history. It remains so for wealthy people, particularly those with passports from rich countries. Border controls arose in the United States not out of any neutral law enforcement principle but to exclude Asians, Jews, Italians, Latinos, blacks, Muslims, and other Others in the service of an exploitative and expansionist empire. Our land borders began to harden only alongside the rise of industrial capitalism, and were only militarized in recent decades.

If Democrats stick to the center on immigration, they will find themselves fighting on two fronts. A fight against Republicans, with the left at their back, will be far easier to win—and a more noble victory. Simple realism dictates that no legislation to grant citizenship to millions will be passed until Republicans are defeated. There’s no use trying to appease them. The bipartisan consensus supporting harsh immigration and border enforcement has fractured. Democratic elected officials need to catch up or be defeated too. It’s the task of the left to accelerate the nascent split, demanding radical reforms that correspond to our dream of a world where no human being is illegal. We must transform nation-states so that they no longer divide workers but instead are conduits for the democratic control of our social, economic, political, and ecological futures.

We must urgently develop demands for policies that will not create an open border overnight but a radically more open border soon. The border must be demilitarized, which would include demolishing the hundreds of miles of already existing wall and dramatically downsizing the Border Patrol. Criminal sanctions on illegal entry and reentry and the public charge rule must be repealed. Links between ICE and local law enforcement created by Secure Communities and 287(g) must be broken. Opportunities for legal immigration, particularly from Mexico and Central America, must be expanded. The right to asylum must be honored. And citizenship for those who reside here must be a stand-alone cause, unencumbered by compromises that are not only distasteful but also politically ineffectual—and that today would provoke opposition from both the nativist right and the grassroots left.

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The nativists start with lies, myths, and distortions. The liberals start with truth and humane values. They used to meet in the “center right” which is “nativism lite” and bad news for migrants and for humane values.

With some logic, Denvir argues that the nativist right has now come “out of their shell” and just advocates against all foreigners and for maximum human cruelty. In other words, complete dehumanization and abandonment of the common good: A trashing of the “Statute of Liberty” (see, e.g., Stephen Miller & “Cooch Cooch”) and an obliteration of the real, diverse America, a nation of immigrants, in favor of a mythical “Whitbread” version that never really existed (as American has always been heavily reliant on the labor of non-white immigrants — but they often were intentionally kept without social standing or political power).

In many ways, the right’s abandonment of the “pro-immigration, anti-illegal immigration” false narrative frees liberals to explore more robust, realistic immigration policies that would serve the national interest, recognize the truth of American as a rich and diverse nation of immigrants, and, perhaps most helpfully, sharply reduce the amount of time, effort, and goodwill squandered on ultimately unrealistic and impractical immigration enforcement schemes and gimmicks (see e.g., “The Wall” & “The New American Gulag”). In that context, immigration enforcement could be rationalized and made more efficient to serve the actual national interests rather than the political (and sometimes financial) interests of the far-right nativist minority.

Interesting thoughts to ponder.

PWS

01-17-20

WASHPOST EDITORIAL: HOW THE TRUMP REGIME’S NATIVIST IMMIGRATION AGENDA ENDANGERS AMERICA’S FUTURE – “But the fact that starting a new life in the United States has come to seem less attractive, both to prospective parents already living here and to prospective arrivals from abroad, is a warning this country cannot afford to ignore.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americans-dip-in-population-growth-is-a-warning-we-shouldnt-ignore/2020/01/03/4f65d1c0-2d90-11ea-bcd4-24597950008f_story.html

The Post’s View

Opinion

American’s dip in population growth is a warning

By Editorial Board

Jan. 4, 2020 at 1:58 p.m. EST

Like all social change, population growth has costs (increased use of limited resources) and benefits (fresh ideas, more people to do necessary work). On the whole, history — both global and American — refutes the Malthusian belief that more people means more misery. To the contrary, a growing labor force is one factor that determines an economy’s capacity to grow. On that basis alone, it would be concerning that the Census Bureau has released new data showing that the U.S. population grew only 6.7 percent in the past decade, which is the slowest 10-year rate since the census began in 1790. Add that all living members of the baby boom generation will have turned 65 by 2030 — and that 18 percent of the nation will be at least that age, according to Pew Research Center population projections — and demographic stagnation begins to seem uncomfortably realistic.

The good news is that, even at reduced rates of growth, the U.S. population, 328.2 million, is still expanding more rapidly than populations of peer nations such as Japan (whose population of 126 million is actually shrinking). The bad news, though, is that both sources of the U.S. edge in population dynamism — a relatively strong birthrate and immigration — are implicated in the Census Bureau’s report. Net international migration — permanent moves to the United States minus permanent departures — was 595,348 between 2018 and 2019. In 2016, by contrast, the figure was 1,046,709. The Census Bureau and other experts have yet to identify a specific cause, but it’s certainly plausible to link the decline to the anti-immigration posture adopted by President Trump during that interval.

Meanwhile, the natural increase in the population between 2018 and 2019 — births minus deaths — was 956,674, the first reading under 1 million in “decades,” according to the Census Bureau. As of 2018, the United States’ total fertility ratestood at 1,728 births per 1,000 women over their lifetimes, well below the replacement rate of 2,100 births per 1,000 women. The causes are unknown, though there may be a continued hangover from the economic uncertainty of the Great Recession.

Unchecked, these trends may mean less economic growth and a diminished support base for a large retired cohort. Boosting birthrates, to be sure, is notoriously difficult, as a number of European countries and Japan have already discovered. Of course, compared with those other countries, the United States has done little to provide paid family leave or subsidized child care — and could do more.

Boosting immigration, by contrast, is relatively easy to accomplish. Or it would be, if the president and many in his party were not engaged in a simplistic campaign to demonize it, one result of which has been to slash refugee admissions from 85,000 in fiscal 2016 to 30,000 in fiscal 2019. Immigration should come through legal channels and be more closely tailored to fit labor force needs. But the need for more of it is real.

The recent dip in population growth need not prove irreversible. But the fact that starting a new life in the United States has come to seem less attractive, both to prospective parents already living here and to prospective arrivals from abroad, is a warning this country cannot afford to ignore.

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Not surprisingly, largely fact-free policy making based on a White Nationalist agenda and the myths about immigrants it necessarily generates will contravene the national interests in many ways while serving the narrow political and sociological interests of a vocal and motivated minority.

PWS

01-06-19

GRETA THUNBERG: AN INSPIRATIONAL LEADER FOR OUR TIMES & THE FUTURE: “She is committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to try to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns.”

Carolyn Kormann writes in The New Yorker:

News Desk

The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg is the Perfect Antidote to Donald Trump

She is committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to try to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns.

On December 3rd, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist from Sweden, completed her second transatlantic voyage, by almost entirely emissions-free sailboats, in the span of four months. Her small figure, dressed in black, stood, waving, on the bow of a catamaran, as it approached the port of Lisbon. Hundreds of people, standing onshore, cheered, welcoming her back to Europe. “I’m not travelling like this because I want everyone to do so,” she told reporters after walking off the boat onto dry land. “I’m doing this to send a message that it is impossible to live sustainably today, and that needs to change.” The scene felt both ancient and precisely of this moment, like Thunberg herself, who writes regularly in a paper journal but has mastered social-media virality, who can seem ageless and androgynous (the fierce stare) while also strikingly young and girlish (the braids), who acts with an otherworldly grace while delivering an outraged message grounded in the latest, best climate science. Her lightning-strike emergence as the planet’s hero, her capacity to inspire students around the world—all in the span of little more than a year—can seem like a prophesied story, an epic poem, a fable. Margaret Atwood (and others, including myself) have compared her to Joan of Arc—if the teen-age medieval warrior, who was burned at the stake in part for impersonating a man, had been inspired by scientific reports instead of divine voices and visions of angels. Centuries from now, we hope, people will live in a thriving, equitable civilization and tell Thunberg’s tale, too.

But it is, as Thunberg says repeatedly, precisely what we do during this century that will determine the fate of those future centuries, and what we do during the next decade that will determine the climate for the nearly two billion children alive today. They are the ones Thunberg represents, whom she is fighting for, and whom she has mobilized, since August, 2018, when she first sat outside the Swedish Parliament with a simple handwritten sign that read, in black letters, “SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET.” Hundreds of thousands of students (and, gradually, their parents), in cities around the world, have followed her lead, striking from school and marching in the streets to protest for climate action. “You say you love your children above all else,” she said in her first big address, at last December’s United Nations climate talks. “And yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

From Lisbon, Thunberg took a train to Madrid, where leaders from around the world were gathering for another round—the twenty-fifth since 1995—of U.N. climate negotiations (known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP25). The point of this year’s talks was for countries to lay the groundwork for ambitious new targets in the reduction of their greenhouse-gas emissions. By the end of 2020, according to the terms of the Paris Agreement, countries are to commit to new nationally determined contributions (N.D.C.s, in U.N.-speak) that reflect the scale of global decarbonization necessary to limit global heating to two degrees Celsius. (The current pool of N.D.C.s, which many countries are not even meeting, would lead to more than three degrees warming by century’s end.) A related issue at the talks has involved carbon markets—detailed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement—in which one country can pay another country for its emissions reductions (the equivalent of buying a carbon credit) and then count those reductions towards its own N.D.C. Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India have, reportedly, all been blocking text that would provide strong regulations of these kinds of markets and accounting mechanisms. Though the final text of this year’s agreement is due today, the deliberations will likely continue at least until Saturday.

Thunberg, meanwhile, has increasingly referred, in mathematical detail, to carbon budgets, or the amount of carbon dioxide that we have left to emit into the atmosphere if we want to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In her speech to world leaders in Madrid, on Tuesday, she referred her audiences to page 108, chapter 2, of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and she said that, if we are to have a sixty-seven per cent chance of achieving that goal, we had, as of the first of January, 2018, four-hundred-and-twenty gigatons of carbon dioxide left in our carbon budget. That number is now much lower, considering that we emit approximately forty-two gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. This means that we have roughly eight years left to burn fossil fuels at current levels before our budget is empty. For all the efforts underway to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they are nowhere near enough. Global emissions again hit a record high in 2019. As Thunberg also said, in the same speech, “The biggest danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and C.E.O.s are making it look like real action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative P.R.”

On Wednesday, Time named Thunberg the magazine’s Person of the Year. Donald Trump, who is famously obsessed with being on the cover of Time, could not stand it. He has campaigned on fossil-fuel expansion, has betrayed on numerous occasions that he does not understand what climate change is, and, on November 4th, he officially began proceedings to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. (Every other country in the world remains a signatory to the pact.) On Thursday, in response to Thunberg’s news, he tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Thunberg, as always, took the President’s mockery in stride, changing her Twitter bio, minutes later, to “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”

This is not the first time that Thunberg has one-upped Trump’s mocking tweets. In September, she gave a historic speech with the kind of rhetorical vigor that exemplifies her gifts as an orator. “This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!” Later, Trump retweeted a video clip of her remarks, adding, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” The same day, Thunberg put the exact words in her Twitter bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

Thunberg is Trump’s perfect foil. She is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns so that we avert climate change’s deadliest impacts and destabilizing tipping points. Thunberg is devoted to learning, writing, and understanding the world around her. She constantly lifts up other young climate leaders—especially those from indigenous and frontline communities—and begs reporters to focus on them, not her. (On Monday, she and Germany’s most prominent youth activist, Luisa Neubauer, hosted a press conference with young leaders from the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Russia, and Uganda.) She is a gifted public speaker, not because she stirs up chaos and hate through incoherent rants, but because she speaks elegantly and intelligently, in logical, pithy, unmuddied sentences. Her rhetorical gifts are, perhaps, all the more remarkable considering that, when she was younger, she fell into a major depression concerning climate change and stopped speaking altogether for months. As she said at the start of her speech on Tuesday, “A year and a half ago, I didn’t speak to anyone unless I really had to. But then I found a reason to speak.”

Carolyn Kormann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Read more.

*****************************

Wow! No wonder Trump and his cronies are so scared of her!

PWS

12-14-19

NEW FROM CMS: Accessible Citizenship Is A Huge Win – Win For The U.S. & The Citizens — Trump Regime Works Overtime To Create A Lose – Lose!

Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

Robert Warren
Senior Visiting Fellow
Center For Migration Studies

View this email in your browser

The Center for Migration Studies Releases New Report on the Benefits of Citizenship and the Barriers to Naturalization

The well-being and contributions of immigrants increase as they advance toward citizenship, but new impediments to permanent residence and naturalization deny access to citizenship.

New York, NY — The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) today released a report finding that the well-being of immigrants and their contributions to the United States increase as they advance to more permanent and secure immigration statuses, culminating in naturalization. The report finds that naturalized citizens match or exceed the native-born by key metrics, including: college degrees (35% vs. 29%); percent employed (96% vs. 95%); and average personal income ($45,600 vs. $40,600).

The report – authored by CMS Executive Director Donald Kerwin and CMS Senior Visiting Fellow Robert Warren – argues that the administration’s “America first” ideology obscures a far-reaching set of policies that significantly impede the ability of immigrants to “move forward” on the path to naturalization, to their own detriment and the detriment of their families and communities.

“The report finds that policy makers should encourage naturalization rather than making it unnecessarily difficult,” said Warren. “Another important finding is that the US legal immigration system currently produces the same percentage of high skilled workers as the native-born population.”

The report documents the Trump administration’s policies that seek to prevent undocumented persons from gaining status, divest documented persons of status, cut legal admissions and immigration by decree, create new barriers to permanent residence and naturalization, and make citizenship a less valuable and less secure status.

It finds that at least 5.2 million current US citizens – 4.5 million children and 730,000 adults – who are living with at least one undocumented parent, obtained US citizenship by birth. It concludes that current immigration enforcement priorities effectively deny the full rights and benefits of citizenship to the US citizen children of undocumented parents, and it warns that eliminating birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented parents would create a permanent underclass of US-born denizens.

“US citizenship represents the principle marker of full membership and equality under the law in our constitutional democracy,” said Kerwin. “Yet this administration has adopted policies to make naturalization far less accessible and to make citizenship a less secure and valuable status for some disfavored citizens.”

The report is now available at: https://cmsny.org/publications/citizenship-kerwin-warren/

MEDIA CONTACT

Emma Winters

(212) 337-3080 x. 7012

ewinters@cmsny.org

***********************

Making losers out of everyone is a specialty of the Trump Regime’s “myth-based” White Nationalist agenda. “Malicious incompetence” in action!

PWS

12-13-19

ALAN CUMMING @ NBC NEWS: THE ANTI-IMMIGRATION MOVEMENT IS ALL ABOUT RACISM, PLAIN AND SIMPLE: “This government is trying to brainwash its citizens into believing that the very thing that has made America what it is and has made America great — immigration — is a negative thing. That is complete doublespeak.“

https://apple.news/A9MUmrFflRFuwxRgcWulUGQ

Opinion | The racism behind anti-immigration rhetoric is palpable to every immigrant. Including me.

America is such a young country: It’s only a few hundred years old, and no one who has been here for only a few generations is without an immigrant connection. So, from the outside — from a place like Europe — the idea that Americans are not connected to immigration and our immigrant pasts seems like we are denying ourselves. We sound very self-hating about the very notion of immigration, but we’re actually just confusing racism with a desire to fix the immigration system.

I see that all the time: Things that are being said about immigration and the ideals of immigration are basically just being used as a thinly veiled form of racism. It’s so blatant. The president himself actually said he doesn’t mind people coming from countries like Norway — white people; it’s the people from “shithole countries” he doesn’t want. It seems almost pedantic and obsolete to actually have to talk about the fact that it’s racism.

The contributions of all immigrants has been so derided by our present administration, so I felt that I needed to celebrate immigration rather than have it openly derided. Also, I wanted to try to make people stand back and just see the anti-immigration propaganda that they were being fed, and understand instead how this country is what it is because of immigration. That was the genesis of my cabaret show (now an Audible book) “Legal Immigrant.”

The whole point of the show was to tell my experience from my perspective as immigrant, but also to show that I’m feeling these negative things about being an immigrant and I’m a white man of privilege; I can’t imagine what it must be like for people of color or Muslims. I don’t know the exact percentage, but I would say that, the day I became an American, at least 75 percent of the other people being sworn in with me were people of color.

So I wanted to try and make people stand back from this vehemence and have some fun while analyzing what was going on. I don’t want to be didactic, though: I understand that there are problems with the immigration system; I understand there’s a massive refugee problem in the world. But I will not condone racism or bigotry as part of that debate.

That doesn’t mean I’m not open to dialogue. I like when people engage, that’s why I do theater. I don’t want to just be behind a screen; I actually enjoy the fact that I can hear how people are reacting to me. And I’ve been heckled doing the show — from both sides. I want to hear what people have to say and I totally engage with some people. A couple of times it got quite rowdy, but that’s why I wanted to do these cabarets. They’re good ways to get people to engage and be provoked, and to maybe change their minds … or at least consider other options. And, at the end of the show, I make everyone in the audience sing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,” so I’m obviously someone who likes bringing people together, even though I also like provoking them.

There’s a thing in this country right now: Any dissent against the president or any disagreement with his views is seen as a red flag and people immediately respond in an aggressive way. People are just screaming at one another right now; it makes it very difficult to engage. And so, aside from trying to celebrate immigration, I’m trying to get people to also stand back and try to not let the tropes of this awful rhetoric blind us to what is actually going on.

This government is trying to brainwash its citizens into believing that the very thing that has made America what it is and has made America great — immigration — is a negative thing. That is complete doublespeak. The idea that if you’re pro-immigrant, you’re anti-America, and if you’re anti-immigration, you are pro-America is completely wrong. That’s not just my opinion; if you stand back from it and look at the history of this country, you can’t deny that is the truth.

I really do believe that people have lost the power of analysis in this country because of the duality of the political system: Politics in this country is a team sport. I also think that, with people like Betsy DeVos running the Education Department, it’s going to take a long time before we have a generation who can regain the powers of analysis. It’s all a multilayered effort to dumb us down, in order to be able to brainwash us and feed us propaganda. We need to stand up and take heed before it’s too late.

As told to THINK editor Megan Carpentier, edited and condensed for clarity.

*********************************

Yup!

It’s hard to have a “debate” or a “dialogue” when one side is wedded to myths and bogus narratives, rather than facts: when one side is driven by what it wants to believe, egged on by those who find it politically advantageous, rather than truth.

One of the worst of the many horrible things about the Trump Regime is that supposedly responsible public officials spread the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee White Nationalist myths and false narratives (see, e.g., “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, “Big Mac With Lies,” Nielsen, “Cooch Cooch,” Mark “Fund My TGIF” Morgan, Matt Albence, EOIR, etc.).

PWS

12-01-19

ANOTHER ILLEGAL TRUMP IMMIGRATION POLICY PUT ON HOLD: This Time It’s His “Insurance Scam” To Slash Legal Immigration — But, Will The Supremes Ultimately Uphold The Rule Of Law, Or Cave To The Trump Regime Again?

Susannah Liuthi — Susannah Luthi
Healthcare Reporter
Politico

https://apple.news/A-uzpmvT_TDyK8JGHsQ60ZA

Susannah Luthi for Politico:

Policy: Employment & Immigration

Judge halts Trump’s insurance mandate for immigrants

A federal judge in Oregon blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deny immigrants visas unless they buy health insurance within 30 days of entering the country or otherwise show they can cover their medical costs.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon issued an order on Tuesday to stop the State Department from enforcing a policy that officials unveiled in late October under a mandate from President Donald Trump, and which could drastically curtail the ability of people to legally migrate to the United States.

Simon noted that the requirement that immigrants buy unsubsidized insurance — meaning they couldn’t get financial assistance through Obamacare — barred poor people from entering the country, which he said clearly infringed on the law.

“The proclamation is anticipated to affect approximately 60 percent of all immigrant visa applicants,” the judge wrote. “The president offers no national security or foreign relations justification for this sweeping change in immigration law.”

Simon agreed with plaintiffs, including U.S. citizens and their overseas family members as well as the non-profit Latino Network, that the rule violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. His decision applies nationwide.

Immigration officials could have begun enforcing the requirement on Dec. 1. The administration is expected to appeal.

Simon, a Barack Obama appointee, had already temporarily blocked the policy from taking effect early this month, saying there was sufficient concern about the legality of the new requirements to merit a delay, particularly since the administration didn’t use a standard public comment period for the new rules.

The plaintiffs argued the sweeping nature of the executive action showed an attempt “to rewrite our country’s immigration laws and fundamentally shift the balance of power between the branches of government.”

The policy originated with a proclamation Trump issued on Oct. 4 that cast confusion and uncertainty onto the immigrant community and raised immediate concerns it could be unworkable. In the original order, Trump laid out the parameters for the types of health insurance legal immigrants could buy as a condition for getting a visa.

They wouldn’t be able to use federal subsidies to buy coverage on Obamacare exchanges, but could buy short-term insurance plans the administration has promoted that are cheaper but only offer barebone coverage.

That latter option layered Trump’s tough immigration policies on top of the fight over short-term plans. Democrat-led states including New York and California — which happen to draw a large share of immigrants — have banned the sale of such plans.

The plaintiffs also argued that since short-term plans leave people underinsured, the directive is undermining its own stated goal of cutting some of the uncompensated care costs from the U.S. health care system.

They also estimated the State Department through the policy would bar up to 375,000 people who could otherwise legally enter the country, shrinking the annual number of legal immigrants by nearly two-thirds.

The administration contends the criticisms are overblown and that the policy wouldn’t affect all legal immigrants, such as parents coming to the country to reunite with their children or vice versa.

Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get top news and scoops, every morning — in your inbox.

****************************

Of course Trump’s intent was to invidiously discriminate against immigrants of color and the poor. Of course, that’s unconstitutional. It’s not rocket science! It’s not even very complicated constitutional law.

But, then again, Trump’s “Muslim Ban,” his rewriting of asylum statutes, and his misappropriation of funds for his border wall stunt were also clearly unconstitutional. That didn’t seem to bother the Supreme’s GOP majority a bit in their “race to roll over for the Trump Regime.” After all, as Trump and his chump Solicitor General Noel Francisco keep not too subtly reminding the “Gang of Five,” they are “bought and paid for” and expected to perform as Regime toadies. Most of the time, they get the message.

So far, the Supremes and many Circuit Courts have lacked the guts and integrity to stand up consistently and powerfully to the Trump Regime’s attacks on our Constitution and humanity.

They apparently think that they are above the fray, particularly when the rights of the most vulnerable and defenseless are involved. But, maybe they are wrong. Perhaps, when Trump has finished eradicating constitutional norms and imposed his unique form of authoritarian dysfunction on our nation, these “robed wondermen” will be refugees along with the rest of us.

Nobody that I’ve ever met expects or wants to be a refugee. It can happen to anyone, at any time, no matter how fat, content, above the fray, and complicit you might be in your current position. Disturbingly, a majority of our very highest judges appear to lack the human perspective, historical knowledge, decency, courage, and empathy to see themselves in the position of those whose legal rights they abuse in Trump’s behalf. They certainly try hard not to understand the situation of refugees and migrants.

Yes, we want fair and impartial judges (something the Supremes have conveniently overlooked in dealing with the Immigration Courts). But, we don’t want or need judges who are detached from or indifferent to humanity and human suffering. After all, our laws are made by humans to regulate human conduct. When detached from its human roots and consequences, it becomes a tool for disorder and tyranny.

PWS

11-27-19

SURPRISE (NOT): Many Of Us Already Knew That CBP Acting Commish Mark Morgan Is Sleazy, Cruel, Immoral, Unethical, & Not Very Bright — Now, It’s Confirmed By The DOJ’s Inspector General — That’s Why He’s A Perfect Fit For The Trump Regime’s Immigration Kakistocracy!

Tal Kopan reports for the SF Chronicle:

Exclusive: Trump’s top border official broke FBI rules to fund happy hours

By Tal Kopan

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s top border official broke federal ethics rules in a previous job by seeking sponsors to buy alcohol and fancy food for FBI happy hours, according to a watchdog report exclusively obtained by The Chronicle.

Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection agency, continued asking the outside entities to pay for the social events even after being warned it was against federal rules, the Justice Department’s inspector general found.

The previously unreported finding raises questions about the Trump administration’s vetting process for top officials. Although Morgan’s role is typically subject to Senate confirmation, Trump has not nominated him for the job. That has circumvented the traditional review by the Senate — leaving it unclear whether the ethical lapse was ever known to the administration.

Customs and Border Protection and Morgan declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The violations occurred when Morgan was working at the FBI in 2015 as deputy assistant director of the training division, according to the inspector general’s report. Midway through the investigation in the summer of 2016, Morgan retired from the FBI and was named under then-President Barack Obama to head the Border Patrol. He declined to cooperate with the probe after that, the report said.

More: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Exclusive-Trump-s-top-border-official-broke-14864340.php#

*****************************************

Let’s see. Morgan is the racist charlatan who claimed that he could identify a future gang member just by “looking in their eyes.” He was also an enthusiastic supporter of Trump’s threatened (but never fully implemented) “reign of terror” directed against families in ethnic communities. And, of course, as acting CBP Honcho, he encourages and presides over parts of the “New American Gulag,” “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico,” and other human rights violations every day.

Plus, Morgan is as dim as he is evil if he considers government ethics advice to be “mere suggestions.” But, of course, when funding of a TGIF is on the line, why not “push the envelope.” He does exhibit the arrogance and disregard for the rules that apply to others that is a hallmark of the Trump Regime’s Kakistocracy.

However, it’s also significant that this information was available when Obama appointed Morgan Border Patrol Chief. Lots of today’s gross abuses by the Trump Regime have their roots in the Obama Administration’s overall poor, often uninformed, and sometimes negligent approach to immigration issues.

Travesties like “family detention,” “insider-only” hiring at the Immigration Courts and the BIA, absolutist positions on indefinite detention, defense of “toddlers representing themselves” in Immigration Court, and use of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” at the Immigration Courts in support of inappropriate and unethical “enforcement goals” all helped create unnecessary disorder and inhumanity in the already poorly functioning system.

Obama had a golden chance both to resolve Dreamers and create an Article I Immigration Court at the beginning of his Administration with badly needed, straightforward statutory reforms. Instead, by putting all of his attention on healthcare, to the exclusion of other pressing humanitarian problems, he more or less insured the later “weaponization” of the Immigration Courts, the creation and expansion of the “New American Gulag,” and holding “Dreamers” hostage.

If Obama had taken bold action in 2009, many of the “original Dreamers” would be fully integrated into our society and on their way to citizenship and full participation in our political process by now. Instead, they are being “hung out to dry” by Trump, the GOP, and likely the Supremes. A generation of American youth is being denied the opportunity to contribute and achieve their full potential in the United States.

And, think of how a “real” independent Immigration Court system, with a diverse judiciary with true immigration, human rights, and due process expertise, might have dealt with Trump’s consistent legal overreach on immigration and asylum issues. Indeed, while the Immigration Court backlog might not have been eliminated by an Article I Court, I’ll be it would be considerably less than it is now with an independent court where judges, not enforcement-driven bureaucrats, are in charge of managing their own dockets.

Obviously, we can’t change the past. But, we certainly can avoid repeating its mistakes in the future. Something to consider when looking at Democratic Presidential contenders.

PWS

11-27-19

IT’S NEVER BEEN ABOUT “LEGAL V. ILLEGAL,” “BORDER SECURITY,” “JOBS,” OR “GETTING IN (NON-EXISTENT) LINES” — The Trump Regime Has Always Been About A White Nationalist Immigration Agenda Of Hate!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/theres-no-other-way-to-explain-trumps-immigration-policy-its-just-bigotry/2019/11/25/348b38f4-0fcc-11ea-9cd7-a1becbc82f5e_story.html

Catherine Rampell in the WashPost:

November 25, 2019 at 7:58 p.m. EST

It was never about protecting the border, rule of law or the U.S. economy. And it was never about “illegal” immigration, for that matter.

Trump’s anti-immigrant bigotry was always just anti-immigrant bigotry.

There’s no other way to explain the Trump administration’s latest onslaught against foreigners of all kinds, regardless of their potential economic contributions, our own international commitments or any given immigrant’s propensity to follow the law. Trump’s rhetoric may focus on “illegals,” but recent data releases suggest this administration has been blocking off every available avenue for legal immigration, too.

Last month, the number of refugees admitted to the United States hit zero. That’s the first month on record this has ever happened, according to data going back nearly three decades from both the State Department and World Relief, a faith-based resettlement organization.

So what happened?

The problem wasn’t that the 26-million-strong global refugee population lacked a single person who met America’s strict screening requirements. No, our admissions flatlined because Trump announced and then delayed signing a new refugee ceiling for the 2020 fiscal year. This delay led to a complete moratorium on admissions.

Hundreds of flights were canceled for approved refugees who had waited years or decades to come — once again, legally — to our shining city on a hill. As the moratorium dragged on, some refugees’ eligibility expired. At least four were minors who have now turned 18. This means they’ve aged out of the resettlement program they were accepted under and now must get back in line, perhaps indefinitely, to reapply under a different system as adults.

By the way, when Trump finally did sign off on that new fiscal 2020 refugee ceiling, it was for a mere 18,000 admissions. That too is an all-time low. The Trump administration has also thrown up other roadblocks for refugees, such as allowing states and localities to veto any resettlements within their borders. (This policy is being challenged in court.)

Trump supporters might argue that, whatever our moral obligations to the world’s destitute and desperate, the president is merely keeping immigrants out to protect our economy.

They are wrong.

The Trump administration’s own research — which it attempted to suppress — found that refugees are a net positive for the U.S. economy and government budgets. That is, over the course of a decade, refugees pay more in taxes than they receive in public benefits.

The Trump administration is also turning away categories of legal would-be immigrants who are historically admitted because they are economically valuable.

Last week, for instance, we learned that enrollment of new international students has fallen more than 10 percent over the past three years, according to the Institute of International Education.

This is a shame. Higher education has been one of our most successful industries, adding $45 billion to the U.S. economy last year alone. International students spend money in the local economies where they study — on lodging, food, books, entertainment. They are also more likely to pay full freight in tuition. This means they cross-subsidize American students, especially in states where public education funding has fallen.

International students are also more likely to major in high-demand STEM fields, providing U.S. employers with a pipeline of talent that supports the jobs of native-born Americans.

New international student enrollment is declining for a number of reasons, including high tuition and fear of campus gun violence. But the barrier most frequently cited by universities lately is problems with the visa-application process. Meanwhile, other developed countries, such as Canada and Australia, are poaching students who might otherwise have contributed their talents here.

These are hardly the only signs we’re discouraging or denying legions of desirable and legal would-be immigrants.

Denial rates for H-1B visas — awarded to high-skilled workers — have more than doubled since Trump took office, according to tabulations from National Foundation for American Policy. Processing delays for citizenship applications have doubled. Naturalization and visa fees have skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, when families apply for their legal right to asylum at the border, we tell them to await processing in Mexico, in a region so dangerous that Americans are instructed not to visit. (“Violent crime, such as murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault, is common,” the State Department website advises.)

There, asylum seekers live outdoors, in filthy, flooded, freezing tents. Agonized parents send sick and frostbitten toddlers to cross into the U.S. alone, because they fear they’ll die waiting in Mexico.

And if these desperate families don’t like living in squalor, we tell them they should just return home, get in line and apply through another legal route into the United States. Perhaps as refugees, students or workers.

As though there were still such routes to be found.

*************************************************************

It’s institutionalized hate, racism, sexism, lawlessness, and cruelty.

One of the worst things is that’s it’s basically enabled by Federal Appellate Courts who see the same problems as many U.S. District Judge do, but “go along to get along” by “normalizing” Trump’s disgraceful racist behavior and “deferring” to pretextual Executive actions that are merely facades for a dishonest, illegal, and unconstitutional White Nationalist agenda. Sort of reminds me of the bogus “separate but equal” doctrine of judicial cowardice.

Apparently, too many life-tenured Article IIIs in the ivory tower think that they and their privileged circles will escape the gratuitous harm being inflicted on our nation and on vulnerable individuals by a scofflaw executive. Certainly, not unlike the enabling white male judges and Supreme Court Justices who “looked the other way” and thereby enabled Jim Crow regimes to corruptly use our legal system to disenfranchise, murder, oppress, and otherwise abuse African American citizens.

Where has judicial courage among the higher levels of our Federal Judiciary gone?

PWS

11-26-19

WHITE NATIONALIST AGENDA: Trump Regime Announces Plans For All-Out Assault On Legal Immigration — “It’s an attempt to lock into place changes to immigration policy that cannot be easily undone, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.”

https://apple.news/AKO1peXCgQpS_Ol7Hfyg_6g

Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes:

Trump Plans Far-Reaching Set Of New Immigration Regulations

The Trump administration plans a far-reaching set of new immigration regulations that, if enacted, would profoundly affect employers, international students, H-1B and L-1 visa holders, EB-5 investors, asylum seekers and others. The proposed forthcoming rules are detailed in the administration’s just-released Unified Agenda for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

H-1B Visas: “As a result of more restrictive Trump administration policies, denial rates for H-1B petitions have increased significantly, rising from 6% in FY 2015 to 24% through the third quarter of FY 2019 for new H-1B petitions for initial employment,” according to a recent National Foundation for American Policy analysis. A new H-1B regulation would make life even more difficult for employers and high-skilled foreign nationals.

The summary of a forthcoming H-1B rule states it would: “[R]evise the definition of specialty occupation to increase focus on obtaining the best and the brightest foreign nationals via the H-1B program, and revise the definition of employment and employer-employee relationship to better protect U.S. workers and wages. In addition, DHS will propose additional requirements designed to ensure employers pay appropriate wages to H-1B visa holders.” (The target date for publishing a proposed rule is December 2019.)

The rule could be used to defend the administration against lawsuits from companies that contend many actions by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on H-1B petitions have violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not going through the rulemaking process.

“Undoubtedly they will push the boundaries and aim for long-term, structural changes to the H-1B visa category,” said Lynden Melmed, a partner at Berry Appleman & Leiden and former Chief Counsel for USCIS, in an interview. “But absent new authority from Congress, going too far risks a court injunction and they could end up with nothing.”

One way USCIS may try to push the boundaries would be to place into regulation the theory behind a March 31, 2017, internal document now used in adjudications that excluded computer programmers from qualifying as a specialty occupation. The document discusses computer programmers and tells adjudicators that since the Department of Labor Occupational Outlook Handbook states that “. . . some employers hire workers with an associate’s degree . . . it suggests that entry level computer programmer positions do not necessarily require a bachelor’s degree and would not generally qualify as a position in a specialty occupation.” (Emphasis added.)

The March 31, 2017, document notes this has applicability to many occupations and states: “The Policy Memorandum is specific to the computer programmer occupation. However, this same analysis should be conducted for occupations where the Occupational Outlook Handbook does not specify that the minimum requirement for a particular position is normally a bachelor’s or higher degree in a specific specialty.” (Emphasis added.)

“Companies may be surprised to learn how many different positions do not require a bachelor’s degree under Department of Labor standards,” said Melmed. “Employers may have to rethink how they approach their talent strategy.”

A new regulation that would “revise the definition of employment and employer-employee” will make it even more difficult for IT services companies and others that place employees at customer locations. Such companies already have experienced much higher H-1B denial rates due to USCIS policies that, attorneys say, have targeted the companies for tougher scrutiny.

H-4 EAD: The administration continues to place on the regulatory agenda a measure to rescind an existing rule that allows many spouses of H-1B visa holders to work. The target date for a proposed rule is March 2020. (See here for more background.)

L-1 Visas: The irony of USCIS trying to tighten the L-1 visa category is companies complain the Trump administration already has made it nearly impossible to gain approval of L-1 visas at U.S. consulates in India to transfer employees into the United States. Companies also cite U.S. consular posts in China as a problem. “Our refusal rate for L visas at consular posts in India is 80% to 90%,” an executive of a major U.S. company told me in an interview. Denial rates have also increased considerably at USCIS for individual L-1B petitions (used for employees with “specialized knowledge”).

According to the summary of a new item placed on the regulatory agenda: “In order to improve the integrity of the L-1 program, the Department of Homeland Security will propose to revise the definition of specialized knowledge, to clarify the definition of employment and employer-employee relationship, and ensure employers pay appropriate wages to L-1 visa holders.” (September 2020 is the target date for publishing a proposed rule.)

Companies note they already endure visa denials by consular officers who, with little background knowledge, decide that a company should only have a limited number of people who possess “specialized knowledge” – even though there is nothing in the law or regulation about a numerical limit within a company on employees with specialized knowledge of a company’s “product, service, research, equipment, techniques, management, or . . . expertise in the organization’s processes and procedures.”

Regulating on L-1 wages may place USCIS in legal difficulties. “As a practical matter, most employers already pay their L-1 workers at high rates of pay,” said Kevin Miner, a partner at the Fragomen law firm, in an interview. “We will want to see what specific regulatory proposals are made regarding wage rates for L-1 workers, since Congress specifically did not impose prevailing wage requirements in the L-1 statute. Adding requirements that Congress has not put into the statute would be an overreach by the agency and would call into question the legal viability of the new regulations.”

International Students, OPT and Unlawful Presence: New enrollment of international students at U.S. universities declined by more than 10% between the 2015-16 and 2018-2019 academic years – and new Trump administration regulations are likely to further discourage international students from coming to America.

The ability to gain practical work experience following a course of studies attracts many international students to the United States. Many competitors for talent and students, such as Canada and Australia, already make it easier than the United States for international students to work after graduation.

The administration continues to target Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows international students to work for 12 months after graduation and 24 additional months in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. A summary of a rule proposal on the agenda states: “ICE [Immigration and Custom Enforcement] will amend existing regulations and revise the practical training options available to nonimmigrant students on F and M visas.” (August 2020 is the target date for a proposed rule.)

Ironically, Trump administration officials from the State Department recently praised Optional Practical Training. “OPT is one of our greatest strengths,” said Caroline Casagrande, a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of State, during a November 18, 2019, press event on international students. “And we know that students value the practical experience that they gain here in the United States and it is one of our most helpful recruitment tools as a reason that a student chooses to study in the United States.”

A 2019 National Foundation for American Policy study by economist Madeline Zavodny concluded, “There is no evidence that foreign students participating in the OPT program reduce job opportunities for U.S. workers.”

In 2018, USCIS issued policy memos that could cause many international students who unknowingly violate their immigration status to be barred from the United States for 10 years. On May 3, 2019, a U.S. District Court issued an injunction blocking the two policy memos following a lawsuit (Guilford College) filed by universities.

USCIS placed on the regulatory agenda plans for a proposed rule (with a September 2020 prospective date) called “Enhancing the Integrity of the Unlawful Presence Inadmissibility Provisions.”

“The recent announcement in the regulatory agenda regarding unlawful presence is likely a response to the Guilford College litigation,” Paul Hughes, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery and the lead attorney in the case, told me. “In Guilford College, the court issued a nationwide injunction blocking USCIS from applying this memo, both because it did not undertake the notice-and-comment rulemaking required by the Administrative Procedure Act, and because it was at odds with the statutory text. It appears that the administration is now trying to use rulemaking in an apparent effort to cure the procedural errors they made the first time.”

The Department of Homeland Security regulatory agenda contains at least two other measures of interest to the education community and international students. An item on the agenda (with a June 2020 target date for a proposed rule) states: “ICE proposes to vet all designated school officials (DSOs) and responsible officers (ROs), who ensure that ICE has access to accurate data on covered individuals via the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).”

An item that remains on the regulatory agenda – with a February 2020 target date for publishing a proposed rule – would establish a “maximum period of authorized stay for students.” Currently, international students are admitted for the “duration of status” until they complete their studies. Universities warn changing to a maximum period of stay is likely to carry negative consequences for students.

EB-5: USCIS has proposed and finalized (November 21, 2019) a rule governing EB-5 (employment-based fifth preference) “immigrant investor classification and associated regional centers” that made significant changes to the category, including substantially raising the minimum investment amount for a foreign investor. The administration appears interested in further restricting the category with two items placed on the agenda. One would make regulatory changes to the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Regional Center Program, including how they file, and their designation, termination and continued participation. The other rule would “increase monitoring and oversight of the EB-5 program as well as encourage investment in rural areas.”

Family Sponsorship: After failing to convince Congress to reduce or eliminate most family-sponsored immigration, the Trump administration put forward two measures that could significantly reduce legal immigration to the United States: 1) an October 4, 2019, presidential proclamation (blocked at least temporarily by a court) would bar new immigrants from entering the United States without health insurance and 2) a rule on Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds – finalized on August 14, 2019, but blocked by an injunction.

A proposed rule on “Enhancing the Integrity of the Affidavit of Support” shows the administration wants to restrict and discourage Americans from sponsoring family members. “DHS intends to update regulations at 8 CFR 213a by aligning the requirements with the statutory provisions and amending sponsorship requirements to better ensure a sponsor has the assets and resources to support the intended immigrant at the statutorily required level,” according to a summary. “DHS further intends to update the provisions to allow the public benefit granting agencies to more easily obtain information from USCIS in order to seek reimbursement from a sponsor when the sponsored immigrant has received public benefits.”

Asylum: Many items on the regulatory agenda aim to restrict asylum, which has already seen wholesale changes in procedures in the past three years. All of the proposed rules are designed to make it more difficult for individuals to avail themselves of the U.S. asylum system.

In one measure, “The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security propose to amend their respective regulations governing the bars to asylum eligibility. The Departments also propose to remove their respective regulations governing the automatic reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum applications.” In another proposed rule, DOJ and DHS would “amend regulations governing the standards and procedures for making credible fear determinations or reasonable fear determinations for aliens who are subject to expedited removal, but who want to seek asylum or express a fear of persecution or torture.” Others would affect asylum interviews, work authorization and procedures.

Other Rules on the Agenda: The administration proposes to continue with its announced fee increases for immigration benefits, make changes that could affect adjustment of status and limit a future administration’s use of parole and employment authorization. “Removal of International Entrepreneur Parole Program” is listed on the agenda with a “final action” date of December 2019.

The Trump administration’s regulatory agenda on immigration is ambitious and far-reaching. It’s an attempt to lock into place changes to immigration policy that cannot be easily undone, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. There is one glaring omission from the Trump administration’s regulatory agenda – any measure to make it easier for foreign-born individuals to work, study or live in the United States.

***************************************

With “Moscow Mitch” and the GOP making sure that Congress can’t do its job and the Supremes and much of the Federal Judiciary apparently in his pocket, Trump’s plans for a White Nationalist Fascist State are on a roll. As Stuart points out, once the damage is done to our nation, it’s likely to take a long time to repair, regardless of when Trump finally leaves office.

Who would have thought that institutions and values developed painstakingly over centuries would be so easily thrust aside by a lawless authoritarian and his gang.

PWS

11-22-19

“CONSTITUTIONAL CASTRATION”– CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: HOW THE FECKLESS GOP CONGRESS IS SCREWING THE MOST VULNERABLE AMONG US BY LETTING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TRASH THE IMMIGRATION LAWS AND END-RUN THE CONSTITUTION WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL PARTICIPATION! – “The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-bulldozed-over-congress-on-immigration-will-lawmakers-ever-act/2019/11/14/67401466-0722-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html

Catherine writes @ WashPost:

By

Catherine Rampell

Columnist

November 14, 2019 at 7:09 p.m. EST

Republican lawmakers seem to be having self-esteem issues.

The legislature, after all, is an equal branch of government with constitutionally granted powers. Lately, nearly all of those powers have been siphoned off by the president and his team of unelected bureaucrats. Yet, again and again, GOP lawmakers meekly submit to this constitutional castration.

To wit: Congress’s power of the purse? Gone. Regardless of how much money Congress appropriates for, say, a border wall or military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has made clear that he’ll ignore the number and pencil in his own.

Congress’s power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? Hijacked by a president who cites bogus “national security” rationales to impose tariffs whenever he likes.

Congress’s duty to “advise and consent” on major appointments? Cabinet and other senior government posts that require Senate confirmation have been atypically littered with “acting” officials instead. In fact, while immigration is ostensibly the president’s signature issue, Trump hasn’t had a single Senate-confirmed director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since he took office. And though Democratic lawmakers may complain, nothing will change as long as Republicans control the Senate.

Which brings me to the most significant power Trump has stripped from Congress: its lawmaking authority. This is best illustrated by the administration’s actions basically rewriting immigration law wholesale, with nary a peep from GOP legislators.

Sure, on some immigration matters, Congress has relinquished its responsibilities, effectively giving Trump the ability to contort immigration policy as he sees fit.

Consider the “dreamers,” the young immigrants brought here as children who know no other country than the United States. They have long been in a legal limbo. Congress could resolve that limbo swiftly and easily by granting the dreamers permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship. This would have the support of majorities of voters from both parties, and the Democratic-controlled House has already passed such legislation.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate wrung their hands and watched helplessly from the sidelines as Trump announced his decision to kill the Obama-era program that protects the dreamers from deportation. Based on a hearing this week, the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold the president’s decision. Yet, despite claiming to care about the issue, Republicans remain unwilling to act.

Similarly, Congress long ago gave the president authority to set the annual cap on refugee admissions. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the Trump administration has used that authority to ratchet the ceiling down to a record low of 18,000. For context, during President Barack Obama’s last year of office, the ceiling was 110,000.

But there are other areas of immigration law on which Congress has acted, definitively and clearly, with legislative language that leaves little room for maneuvering by the executive. The Trump administration has flouted these laws anyway.

Take asylum law.

“Refugees” and “asylum seekers” both refer to immigrants fleeing violence or persecution, but, technically, “refugees” apply for sanctuary while still abroad, and asylum seekers apply while in the country of their destination. Unlike with refugeeadmissions, there are no legal caps on the number of people who may qualify for and receive asylum. The law does not allow the executive branch to set them, either.

But the Trump administration has effectively set its own limits.

Last year, for instance, the Trump administration tried to ban people from applying for asylum if they crossed between ports of entry — as most asylum seekers are now forced to do, because the administration has severely throttled (or “metered”) the number of people who may apply through a given port of entry per day.

This “asylum ban” was blocked by the courts — because Congress has explicitly said asylum seekers can apply whether or not they entered the United States “at a designated port of arrival.”

“The law is crystal, crystal clear on this,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.

With virtually no pushback from Republicans in Congress, Trump administration then implemented a sort of asylum ban 2.0. This one disqualifies asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States without first applying for asylum there. A separate legal challenge — one among many — is now working its way through the courts.

A host of other changes designed to serve as a backdoor limit on asylee admissions have also been announced in recent weeks. Last week, the administration announced a new processing fee for asylum seekers, which would effectively disqualify families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This week, it proposed a rule denying many asylum seekers authorization to work while their cases are being adjudicated, which can take years. This will force more immigrants into the shadows, contrary to Congress’s intentions.

The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?

********************************************

Catherine and some other reporters “get it” as to what Trump is doing to the law, our democratic institutions, and our Constitution. How come Federal Appellate Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and GOP legislators stick their collective heads in their sand and pretend not to understand the true long-term ramifications of what they are letting Trump do? Why aren’t they protecting our Constitutional and civil rights, not to mention human rights?

It’s all part of “Dred Scottification” – the degradation and dehumanization of individuals while stripping them of their rights combined with a constant barrage of outright lies and false narratives. And, contrary to the apparent belief of many “Trump Toadies” throughout our system and the electorate, once Trump turns on them, which he eventually will, the rights they counted on for protection will be long gone. The total lack of empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate the pain and suffering of others, is perhaps the worst aspect of the Trump kakistocracy.

Thanks, Catherine, for your courageous and insightful writing!

PWS

11-15-19

MICHAEL GERSON @ WASHPOST: THE “TRULY TRUMPIAN MEN” SYMBOLIZE THE GOP’S DESCENT INTO WHITE NATIONALISM AND DISHONESTY: “Miller and Jordan are giving us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man — guided by bigotry, seized by conspiracy theories, dismissive of facts and truth, indifferent to ethics, contemptuous of institutional norms and ruthlessly dedicated to the success of a demagogue.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/stephen-miller-and-jim-jordan-give-us-a-taste-of-the-truly-trumpian-man/2019/11/14/e187e8b8-0725-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html

Across the years of a presidential administration, the churn of politics and policy brings certain men and women to the top of U.S. politics. The past few days have demonstrated the paths to preferment and influence in the Trump years.

First is the case of Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to President Trump and the administration’s unofficial liaison to the alt-right world.

Miller is best known as the prime mover behind the Muslim travel ban and the main opponent of any political compromise involving compassion for Dream Act “dreamers.” Now, with the release of a trove of emails sent to Breitbart writers and editors in 2015 and 2016 (soon before Miller became a Trump administration official), we get a glimpse of Miller’s inspirations and motivations. In response to the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white nationalist in 2015, Miller was offended that Amazon removed merchandise featuring the Confederate flag and was concerned about the vandalization of Confederate monuments. Miller encouraged attention at Breitbart to a “white genocide”-themed novel, featuring sexualized violence by refugees. He focused on crime and terrorism by nonwhites as the basis for draconian immigration restrictions. He complained about the “ridiculous statue of liberty myth” and mocked the “national religion” of “diversity.” He recommended and forwarded stories from a range of alt-right sources.

All this is evidence of a man marinated in prejudice. In most presidential administrations, a person with such opinions would be shown the White House exit. But most of Miller’s views — tenderness for the Confederacy, the exaggerated fear of interracial crime, the targeting of refugees for calumny and contempt — have been embraced publicly by the president. Trump could not fire his alt-right alter ego without indicting himself. Miller is safe in the shelter of his boss’s bigotry.

Second, there is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the tireless, tendentious, often bellowing chief defender of Trump during the impeachment hearings.

Jordan is not, of course, alone in his heroic sycophancy. GOP Reps. Devin Nunes (Calif.), Mark Meadows (N.C.) and others try to equal him. Together they update Alexander Pope: Fools rush in where Mick Mulvaney and Rudy Giuliani fear to tread.

But Jordan has mastered the art of talking utter rubbish in tones of utter conviction. His version of the events at the heart of the impeachment inquiry? Rather than committing corruption, Trump was fighting corruption. Military assistance was suspended, in Jordan’s telling, while the president was deciding whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “legit” in his determination to oppose corruption. When Trump found that Zelensky was the “real deal,” the aid was released.

This is a bold but flimsy lie, of the type Trump has made common. Why, in this scenario, would Trump try to secure specific commitments from Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and to examine Trump’s conspiracy theory about Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election? Are we supposed to believe that Trump employed these as random, theoretical examples of corruption that a worthy, crime-fighting leader would root out? And was the release of U.S. aid just two days after Congress was notified about the whistleblower report a coincidence as well?

Jordan asks us not to accept additional facts but to live in a substitute reality. Almost everyone who participated in these events — both professional staff and political appointees — has affirmed that Trump was employing leverage to secure his political objectives. It is the plain meaning of the reconstructed transcript of Trump’s call to Zelensky.

But none of this matters to Jordan or his colleagues. Consistency and coherence are beside the point. Their objective is not to convince the country; it is to maintain and motivate the base, and thus avoid Trump’s conviction in the Senate. The purpose is not to offer and answer arguments but to give partisans an alternative narrative. And the measure of Jordan’s success is not even the political health of his party (which is suffering from its association with Trump); it is the demonstrated fidelity to a single man.

The elevation of Trump to the presidency has given prominence to a certain kind of follower and permission for a certain set of social values. Bolsheviks once talked of creating the New Socialist Man. Miller and Jordan are giving us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man — guided by bigotry, seized by conspiracy theories, dismissive of facts and truth, indifferent to ethics, contemptuous of institutional norms and ruthlessly dedicated to the success of a demagogue.

Every day of Trump’s term continues the moral deconstruction of the Republican Party and brings the further debasement of American politics.

*******************************

Let’s hear that again:

Every day of Trump’s term continues the moral deconstruction of the Republican Party and brings the further debasement of American politics.

Yup!

This also confirms what we already knew about Miller’s “role model,” his former boss and White Nationalist nativist “mentor’ Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. He’s someone who should have been disowned by the GOP ages ago and who has demonstrated “beyond a reasonable doubt” his total unfitness too hold public office!

PWS

11-15-19

NIGHTMARE ON 1st ST., NE: AS SUPREMES APPEAR SEARCHING FOR WAY TO “STICK IT TO” DREAMERS, TRUMP’S OBSESSION WITH REMOVING LONG-TIME UNDOCUMENTED INDIVIDUALS REMAINS HIGHLY UNPOPULAR!

https://apple.news/AVLJN2Lt1SD-o5h81B1pQqw

Chantal Da Silva reports for Newsweek:

Most Americans Want Undocumented Immigrants To Be Able To Stay Legally

November 12, 2019

The majority of Americans believe it is important for the U.S. to establish a way for most undocumented immigrants in the country to remain here legally, a new study has found.

The revelation from the Pew Research Center’s findings, which were published on Tuesday, comes as the Supreme Court deliberates over whether the Trump administration can legally end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Under the DACA program, nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. by their parents have been allowed to live and work in the country.

Related Stories

• Will Donald Trump Be Able to End DACA? Decision Heads to Supreme Court

However, the Trump administration has sought to bring the program to an end, a bid which was temporarily blocked by courts and which will now be brought before the Supreme Court this week.

According to the Pew Research Center’s findings, two-thirds of Americans (67 percent) said it was “very or somewhat important” for the U.S. to establish a way for “most immigrants in the country illegally to remain her legally.”

While support for a pathway for undocumented immigrants to remain in the U.S. fell largely along party lines, nearly half (48 percent) of Republican and Republican-leaning participants said they were in favor of the idea.

Meanwhile, 82 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they felt it was an important goal.

In addition to establishing a route for most undocumented immigrants to be able to remain in the U.S., Americans also expressed support for taking in refugees fleeing war and violence.

Seventy-three percent of the 9,895 respondents who were surveyed between September 3 and 15 said they felt it was important for the U.S. to take in refugees, with Republicans showing greater support for that goal than in previous years.

In 2016, Pew said, just 40 percent of Republicans identified admitting refugees as an important initiative. This year, however, a majority of Republicans (58 percent) said they supported that goal.

While the majority of Americans were in favor of both of the above initiatives, they also expressed support for strengthening security along the U.S.-Mexico border, with 68 percent of participants in favor of that goal.

Around 9 in 10 Republicans (91 percent) said they were in favor of increasing security at the border, while about half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents (49 percent) said they believed it was an important bid.

The apparent divide between Republicans and Democrats is also significant when it comes to increasing deportations of immigrants unauthorized to be in the U.S.

Roughly eight-in-ten Republicans (83 percent) said they were in favor of increasing deportations, including 51 percent who identified that initiative as “very important.”

Meanwhile, among Democrats, support for that bid was much lower, with around just three-in-10 (31 percent) in favor of boosting deportations and only 10 percent calling it a “very important” goal.”

Despite what the American public thinks, the decision on whether DACA is allowed to move forward currently sits in the Supreme Court’s hands.

Justices will be deliberating on whether federal courts should have been able to block the Trump administration’s decision to end the program—and whether Trump had the legal right to end it in the first place.

If the program does come to an end, the thousands of people who benefit the program, as well as the many who might have applied for DACA protections in the future could face deportation from the U.S.

In an interview with Newsweek on Monday, Carolina Fung Feng, a DACA recipient and plaintiff in one of the cases before the Supreme Court, said that if the Supreme Court rules in the Trump administration’s favor, she could lose her job and be deported back to a country that she left when she was 12-years-old.

“I’d be separated from my family here in New York and, also, I would lose the ability to be independent,” Feng said. “Right now, I live on my own with my younger brother, so if they were to eliminate the DACA program permanently I wouldn’t be able to help my brother pay for the house.”

Feng, who is now 30 and works in the U.S. helping adult learners earn their high school equivalency diplomas, said she cannot understand why the U.S. government would want to see the country lose a population that has contributed to the country’s economy and strengthened its local communities.

“We contribute to this economy. We haven’t done anything wrong,” she said. “We’re just human beings who want to live a better life and we want to protect our families and do the best we can so they can have a better life.”

***************************

A majority of the Supremes appear ready to “go along to get along” with the latest move by the Trump Administration to screw, demean, and dehumanize undocumented American young people who are continuing to contribute to our society.

A Court that not so long ago had little trouble treating inanimate and amoral large corporate interests as “persons” under the Constitution appeared to have no such concerns for the rights and dignity of a large class of human beings actually living, working, and studying in America.

By either agreeing with the bogus legal argument half-heartedly presented by the Solicitor General or saying Trump could act for no particular reason other than his White Nationalist political agenda, the Supremes appeared willing to allow young people to be held hostage for an extreme nativist anti-immigrant legislative program.

Trump gave his usual “off-the-wall tweet.” First, he smeared so-called “Dreamers” as containing among their ranks “tough, hardened criminals” (even though such individuals were specifically excluded from the program by the Obama Administration). At the same time, he said that if his Supremes gave him what he demanded he would cut a “deal” with the Dems for Dreamer relief. We’ve heard that before.

That’s highly unlikely to happen without regime change in the Executive and the Senate. Similar to the last failed exercise, the Trump Administration would almost certainly demand an end to refugee and asylum programs, sharp cuts to legal immigration, massive new funding for the New American Gulag, and a free hand to summarily deport almost anyone without due process in return for even limited Dreamer relief. That’s a “deal” the Dems aren’t going to make.

Therefore, most Dreamers likely will continue to “twist in the wind” for another election cycle and perhaps longer. With Immigration Court backlogs at an astounding 1.3 million and growing, they won’t be forcibly removed any time in the near future, even if Trump wins re-election.

On the other hand, deprived of work authorization and “color of law” status, most will face obstacles to legal employment or study in the U.S. This will leave them with the “choice” of “going underground” or “self-deportation.” Either way, America will be deprived of the full potential of some of our most talented and dedicated younger generation.

Of course, I hope that my gloomy analysis is wrong. But, things are sure looking like another avoidable judicially-enabled nightmare in a nation that has empowered a White Nationalist minority to run roughshod over individual rights with judicial complicity.

I would expect the Supreme majority’s decision to be loaded with some disingenuous and self-serving references as to how disputes like the fate of the Dreamers should be determined by the “political system.” Then, it will be good to remember that this is a Court that has chosen to take a “pass” on partisan gerrymandering and other gimmicks used by the GOP and the Trump Administration to disenfranchise racial minorities, suppress the vote, and circumvent true democratic rule. In other words, the Supremes know full well that the “political system” is broken to a large extent because they have helped enable its demise.

That’s why it’s important for the New Due Process Army and others who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, and basic human decency to get out the vote, remove the GOP across the board, and pave the way for better, more intellectually honest judges, who will uphold individual rights and true Constitutional values rather than siding with the tyranny of an unrestrained, unprincipled Executive and inanimate corporate interests in derogation of human rights.

Obviously, there are lots of folks out there, even among the GOP, who don’t “buy in” to Trump’s unrelenting cruelty toward migrants (except, I guess, those migrants he marries and their foreign-born families). The Dems shouldn’t be afraid to run on a program of Dreamer relief combined with other practical, common sense reforms that would allow us to “rationalize” the inevitable and largely positive forces of human migration. We could actually be “beefing up” our revenue collections with a sane immigration policy, rather than hemorrhaging billions on cruel, inhumane, and ultimately futile “enforcement only” schemes and gimmicks. And, yes, with a more rational and realistic system in place, including for the processing of legitimate refugees and asylees, removal of those who evade it would become more efficient, effective, and uniform than it is under our current broken system, at least as administered by the Trump Administration.

Finally, here’s a link to a great article from Zachary Pleat at Mediamatters “calling out” NBC, CBS, and other so-called “mainstream media” for uncritical repetition and re-publication of Trump’s smears and racist-inspired lies about “Dreamers.” https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/daca-goes-supreme-court-cbs-and-nbc-push-trumps-lie-about-dreamers.

PWS

11-12-19

HISPANICS HELPED RESCUE AMERICA’S CITIES: Their Reward: Donald Trump & His White Nationalist Mafia!

A.K. Sandoval-Strausz
Director of Latinx Studies
Penn State

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/08/how-latinos-saved-american-cities/?arc404=true

How Latinos saved American cities

After whites fled and before the ‘creative class’ moved in, immigrants kept urban neighborhoods alive.

A.K. Sandoval-Strausz

November 8, 2019

Chicago’s South Lawndale was just like countless other neighborhoods that bottomed out during the urban crisis of the mid-20th century. Settled after the fire of 1871 and built up in the early 1900s, it had prospered as an industrial district offering steady factory work and affordable housing to immigrants from Germany, Poland and Bohemia. But by the 1960s, its white residents were leaving en masse, moving to the suburbs for newer housing and to avoid sharing the neighborhood with black families who were moving in. The writer Stuart Dybek remembered South Lawndale in those years as a place where people “walked past block-length gutted factories [and] . . . half-boarded storefronts of groceries that had shut down when they were kids, dusty cans still stacked on the shelves.”

But some locals saw a solution to the neighborhood’s decline. Among them was Richard Dolejs, a real estate agent and community leader. Instead of moving out, he recalls, “we said: ‘Well, what about the Mexican community? We should apply to that group and try to bring ’em in.’ ” In the early ’60s, he persuaded lenders to write mortgages for the newcomers and hired Spanish-speaking staff to help them with the paperwork. This was not just altruism: Dolejs’s neighbors wanted to sell or rent their houses to somebody, and since a nearby barrio was being destroyed in the name of “urban renewal,” Hispanic Chicagoans needed somewhere new to live.

They found it.

Depopulation, job loss, fiscal distress and soaring crime in America’s cities were among the nation’s most intractable problems from the 1950s to the early 1990s. When that crisis abated, many experts credited the recovery largely to the “creative class,” urban professionals and other people with money. But it owed more to Latino immigrant families who had begun to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods decades earlier, laying essential foundations for the well-heeled to return. As Latin American migrants are today demonized and scapegoated, their indispensable role in solving one of the greatest crises of the 20th century shouldn’t be overlooked.

[Trump has spread more hatred of immigrants than any American in history]

Like South Lawndale, many other city neighborhoods deteriorated steadily during the urban crisis. Dallas’s Oak Cliff area had thrived starting in the 1940s thanks to military spending on a nearby aircraft and missile factory. The prospect of racial integration, however, led a few whites to launch racist attacks and many more to flee to homogeneous neighborhoods in north Dallas or the suburbs. Oak Cliff’s Mexican American population grew beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, when Dallas officials ran new highways through another area, disrupting the city’s main barrio and displacing its residents; they were joined by Mexican immigrants beginning in the 1970s.

Latino migrants saved neighborhoods like these from the abandonment and decay that afflicted so much of urban America. While virtually every other demographic group in most cities shrunk, Latin American newcomers replenished neighborhoods. In 1960, my research in census data found that South Lawndale and Oak Cliff were each about 1 to 2 percent Hispanic; four decades later, 91 percent of South Lawndale’s 81,000 residents and 76 percent of Oak Cliff’s 116,000 denizens were Latinos. They were a community lifeline at a time when many landlords, unable to sell or rent their properties but still responsible for mortgages and taxes, hired “torches” to burn them down so they could collect insurance money. Between 1950 and 1980, the North Lawndale neighborhood lost a shocking 10,000 housing units, nearly a third of its previous total. But in adjacent South Lawndale, the number of dwellings held steady as Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants became homeowners.

This was a nationwide phenomenon. New York City lost 820,000 residents between 1950 and 1980, and it would have shrunk more if not for gains of over 1 million new Latinos after 1980. Boston lost 238,000 residents in those decades but gained 100,000 new Latinos since 1980. Cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia also depended on arriving Latinos — about 85,000 in Milwaukee and 160,000 in Philadelphia — to help stabilize their populations. The clearest example was Chicago, which shed more than 600,000 residents between 1950 and 1980. Nearly 370,000 new Hispanic residents after 1980 saved the Windy City, which is now 29 percent Latino, from losing population as quickly as urban-crisis bellwethers like Detroit and Cleveland.

[Family-based immigration has ‘merit,’ too]

Three decades of population decline in most urban areas nationwide gave way to a new era, beginning around 1980, when more than two-thirds of the 25 biggest cities gained residents. Much of this increase owed to Latinos. In most big cities, Hispanic populations expanded in the 1970s and reached peak growth rates by the 1990s; meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white populations shrank continuously, with the predominantly white “creative class” stabilizing this demographic only in the past 20 years. As a result, of those 25 biggest cities, 12 have populations that are more than one-quarter Hispanic, including eight that are more than one-third Hispanic and two, San Antonio and El Paso, that are majority Latino. By the same token, research on more than 3,000 U.S. counties and 150 big cities has demonstrated that Latinos were the largest immigrant group contributing to economic growth, as an influx of immigrants generated jobs and propelled revitalization through the housing sector.

This is not just a question of numbers. It is difficult to imagine how many neighborhoods — from the North Corona section of Queens to Detroit’s Mexicantown to Minneapolis’s Lake Street to everything west of Interstate 25 in Denver — could have sustained themselves without the arrival of 25 million new Latino urbanites over the past half-century. Equally important, however, are the ways these migrants imported everyday customs from Latin America and adapted them for their new homes.

The most significant of these habits was a preference for walking over driving. In countries such as Mexico, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, few people owned cars, especially in the rural areas from which most immigrants came. This made the newcomers the ideal inheritors of the American urban core, a landscape created before the automobile. While Anglo Americans were leaving in droves for car-dependent suburbia, Latinos repopulated neighborhoods built around pedestrians and public transportation.

This in turn revitalized the inner-city commercial landscape. Urban small businesses had been declining for decades, pressured since the mid-1950s by suburban malls and since the 1970s by predatory big-box retailers. But new Latino residents energized neighborhood commerce. They shopped locally, at stores they could walk to, where shopkeepers spoke Spanish. Businesses like these enjoyed a protected market with a growing clientele: The Kauffman Index, which measures entrepreneurial activity, showed that in almost every year from 1996 through 2018, Latinos were more likely than any other demographic group to open their own businesses.

They also brought life back to city streets. While two generations of American thinkers fretted over the loss of public life, from Richard Sennett’s “The Fall of Public Man” in 1977 to Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” in 2000, Latino neighborhoods experienced a revival of streetside socializing. Once-empty sidewalks, play areas and parks echoed with the sounds of música norteña, salsa and cumbia and the cheers of spectators at neighborhood soccer leagues — and eventually, Anglo Americans learned to shout “¡Goooooooool!” when a team scored.

In Oak Cliff, Latino immigrants helped reverse two decades of falling property values, and by the 1980s, local homes were appreciating faster than in Dallas as a whole. As the city’s share of Latinos jumped from the 1990s into the 2010s, Dallas’s crime rate began a decline that saw homicides drop by 69 percent between 1991 and 2018. Similarly, in South Lawndale, home values more than doubled between 1990 and 2000, and by 2018 the number of homicides citywide had dropped by 40 percent from its peak in 1991. Neighborhood business activity soared; soon journalists, business groups, social scientists and public officials were lauding South Lawndale — now known as Little Village — as an example of a new and revitalized Chicago. Like other barrios, it still had problems with poverty, underfunded schools and delinquent youth, but things had improved dramatically.

Leaders of cities nationwide soon recognized the positive effects of immigration. They organized to welcome newcomers, especially after the 2010 Census showed how many urban areas depended on immigrants to sustain their populations and workforces. Detroit, for example, launched a development initiative called Global Detroit, observing that “immigration has proven, by far, to be the best American strategy to combat population loss.” A few years later, Detroit’s leaders joined with municipal officials from across the industrial heartland to establish the Welcoming Economies Global Network — its motto is “Leading Rust Belt Immigrant Innovation” — with more than two dozen affiliates.

Latin American immigrants have filled essential roles in metropolitan economies, making up a large proportion of home builders, child-care workers, building maintenance staff, and restaurant cooks, servers and busboys. Sociologists and economists have shown that the urban professionals cities covet today need child care and other household help, and that they are attracted to cities by cafes, clubs and restaurants. Without the hands that have built and renovated homes, looked after children, kept office buildings running, and prepared meals, white-collar families wouldn’t live in urban America.

[Yes, you can gentrify a neighborhood without pushing out poor people]

These urban professionals increasingly require not just Latino labor but Latino space, as they seek out neighborhoods with “character” and “authenticity.” In numerous barrios — from San Francisco’s Mission District to Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights to New York’s Washington Heights — urban professionals have paid barrios their highest compliment by gentrifying them. A few years ago, Chicago immigrant José Luis Arroyo recalled a young white man who walked up and asked to purchase his house, saying he had lived there before his family moved away. “These Americans left because they thought we were going to destroy their neighborhood,” Arroyo told researchers for the Chicago Mexican Migrant Oral History Project. “These young peoples’ parents got scared and moved away, and they took their children with them. And then these children grew up and became professionals and came to visit the barrio. And now they want to move back!”

The revitalizing influence of Latinos and other immigrants now extends far beyond cities. Many of the pathologies of the urban crisis are today afflicting rural America, where a lack of economic opportunity and a catastrophic opioid epidemic have emptied out small towns and left vast numbers of workers disabled. Once again, Latin American newcomers have led the way in addressing the rural crisis by providing much-needed labor on Pennsylvania farms, in Iowa meatpacking plants and at Wyoming nature resorts and repopulating the surrounding small towns. Of the nearly 2,300 rural counties in the United States, 94 percent saw increases in Hispanic residents between 1990 and 2000, and from 2000 to 2010, Latinos made up 58 percent of all population growth in nonmetropolitan counties.

A nation of immigrants is what we have been, and it is what we shall remain. The newest Americans trust us to be the nation we said we were for all those years: a city upon a hill, the North Star, the last best hope of Earth, Mother of Exiles. Perhaps they can help us recognize ourselves; for they are just the latest in a proud lineage of migrants seeking their promised land.

*************************************************

Trump’s racist White Nationalism basically targets all who “differ” from his absurd “nativist vision” of America and his disdain for truth and values.

PWS

11-11-19

THE HATER-IN-CHIEF: “Trump has attacked and scapegoated immigrants in ways that previous presidents never have — and in the process, he has spread more fear, resentment and hatred of immigrants than any American in history.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-has-spread-more-hatred-of-immigrants-than-any-american-in-history/2019/11/07/7e253236-ff54-11e9-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html

Professor Tyler Anbinder writes in WashPost:

November 7, 2019 at 10:03 a.m. EST

President Trump insists that he harbors no prejudice against immigrants. “I love immigrants,” he told Telemundo in June. Indeed, Trump has married two immigrants — Ivana Zelníčková (from what is now the Czech Republic) and Melanija Knavs (born in what is now Slovenia). He does occasionally say something positive about an immigrant group, such as when he wondered why the United States couldn’t get more immigrants from Norway. But for the most part, Trump portrays immigrants as a threat or a menace, and he calls the largest segment of America’s newcomers — Latinos — “animals” and invaders.

As a historian who specializes in the study of anti-immigrant sentiment, I know that Trump is not the first president to denigrate newcomers to the country. But Trump has attacked and scapegoated immigrants in ways that previous presidents never have — and in the process, he has spread more fear, resentment and hatred of immigrants than any American in history.

Trump’s nativism is especially striking for its comprehensiveness. Over the centuries, nativists have leveled 10 main charges against immigrants: They bring crime; they import poverty; they spread disease; they don’t assimilate; they corrupt our politics; they steal our jobs; they cause our taxes to increase; they’re a security risk; their religion is incompatible with American values; they can never be “true Americans.”

Trump has made every one of these charges. No American president before him has publicly embraced the entire nativist worldview. A commander in chief who is also the nativist in chief has the potential to alter immigrants’ role in American society now and for generations to come.

There have, of course, been upsurges of nativism in previous eras, but presidents have rarely been the ones stoking the flames. President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which among other things nearly tripled the time immigrants had to wait before they could become citizens and vote, but his voluminous writings contain nary a word critical of immigrants.

Millard Fillmore, president at the height of the massive influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine, remained silent during his administration on the social tensions these newcomers caused. Even in 1856, when the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party (popularly called the Know Nothing Party) nominated Fillmore to return to the White House, he and his surrogates eschewed attacks on immigrants and rebranded the party as a moderating force between proslavery Democrats and anti-slavery Republicans.

Congress has typically been the source of the greatest nativist zeal in national politics — and presidents have generally tried to tamp down that zeal. Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester Arthur vetoed legislation barring the immigration of Chinese laborers in the 1870s and 1880s, though Arthur later agreed to sign a 10-year ban. In subsequent decades, Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson vetoed bills making the ability to read a prerequisite for adult men to immigrate. Congress eventually overrode Wilson’s veto to enact such a law in 1917.

By the 1920s, most Americans were convinced that further limits on immigration were necessary. “America must be kept American,” President Calvin Coolidge declared in December 1923, following the political winds, and by “American,” he meant white in race, Anglo-Saxon in ethnicity and Protestant in religion. Coolidge endorsed the severe limits Congress placed on the immigration of Slavs, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Eastern European Jews and accepted a ban on immigration from Asia and Africa, as well.

Those racist restrictions were rescinded in 1965. When Lyndon Johnson sat at the feet of the Statue of Liberty and signed legislation that ended the discriminatory quotas, he predicted that the federal government would “never again shadow the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.” But Johnson could not have imagined a president like Trump.

The only Americans who came even remotely close to rivaling Trump’s nativist influence were more narrowly focused than the president is. Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were widely admired anti-Semites whose views reached millions, but their animus was focused on powerful Jews at home and abroad, not Jewish immigrants in general. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest, had millions of loyal radio listeners in the 1930s, but he, too, was more an anti-Semite than a broad nativist. None of them commanded the devotion of nearly as large a share of the population as Trump does.

John Tanton, who died this year, was a driving force behind the modern anti-immigration movement, organizing and raising money for a variety of groups that have advocated a reduction in immigration. But those groups didn’t have influence until Trump began spreading their ideas and appointing their leaders and allies to positions in his administration.

Trump’s anti-immigrant efforts have featured several classic nativist tropes. He falsely associates immigrants with crime, as when he said during his campaign that Mexicans are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In truth, immigrants commit significantly less crime than the native-born do. He scapegoats entire immigrant religious groups for the actions of one or two criminals, calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after Syed Rizwan Farook (who was not even an immigrant) and his wife (who was foreign-born) killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. He perpetuates the notion that immigrants pose a public health threat, as when he wondered in 2018 why we let “all these people from shithole countries come here.” One of his objections, reportedly, was that Haitians “all have AIDS,” though the White House denies he said that. He’s making it harder for low-income immigrants to come here in ways that would almost certainly reduce immigration from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, justifying his proposal on the grounds that he needs to “protect benefits for American citizens.” And he argues that even the U.S.-born children of recent immigrants — if they are part of ethnic, religious or racial minorities — are not real Americans, as he suggested when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

What makes Trump more influential than any previous American nativist is the size of his audience and the devotion of his supporters. Trump has more than 66 million Twitter followers and a powerful echo chamber in conservative media, allowing him to instantaneously convey his ideas to a quarter of the adult population. Other presidents had passionate followers (Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan come to mind), but none of them expressed much, if any, animus toward immigrants. Trump’s rhetoric has changed the way many Americans view immigrants: Nearly a quarter now call immigration a “problem,” more than double the percentage who characterized it that way in 2015, and the highest share since Gallup began asking that question a quarter-century ago.

Trump has made public expressions of nativism socially acceptable for the first time in generations. As he lambasted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali immigrant, at a July rally in Greenville, N.C., the crowd erupted with chants of “Send her back,” echoing Trump’s notorious tweet. “There was a filter,” a Latino resident of Greenville noted after the rally, that previously prevented Americans from expressing such hatred of immigrants, but “now the filter has been broken. My Hispanic friends are afraid to go to the store. They’re afraid to do anything. It’s scary.”

Trump’s spread of nativism has led to an upsurge in animosity directed at immigrants. Those who read or hear the president’s nativist views are more likely to write offensive things on social media about the groups he targets, one political science study found. One study using data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League found that counties that hosted Trump rallies in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the following months, primarily assaults or acts of vandalism, compared to counties that didn’t host rallies. ABC News identified at least 29 cases in which violence or threats of violence were carried out, and the perpetrators targeted immigrants or those perceived to be immigrants more than any other group.

The president’s rhetoric inspires not merely petty violence but occasionally full-fledged acts of terrorism as well. Throughout the fall of 2018, Trump relentlessly sowed fears that an “invasion” of Central American refugees was imminent via an immigrant “caravan” heading through Mexico toward the United States. Before a gunman killed 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, he apparently justified his actions on the grounds that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which these days assists refugees from all over the world, “likes to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.”

Five months later, the man accused of killing more than 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand hailed Trump as a symbol “of renewed white identity” in an online manifesto. In August, a man traveled to El Paso with the goal of killing as many Latinos as possible, authorities said, slaying 22 people at a Walmart. A manifesto linked to him echoed many of the president’s favorite talking points: It condemned “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” charged that immigrants are taking jobs from natives and lauded Republicans for reducing “mass immigration and citizenship.” These accused shooters all seemingly found Trump’s nativist rhetoric inspirational.

While this upsurge in nativist violence is terrifying, history suggests that, over the long term, those who embrace immigrants will win out over those who fear them. The percentage of Americans who want to cut immigration has risen since Trump took office, but that figure is still down by almost half since the mid-1990s. Ironically, Trump’s nativist pronouncements and actions may have galvanized Americans who oppose him to look even more favorably at immigrants than they did before. Seventy-six percent of Americans now say that immigration is good for the country — an all-time high in Gallup’s poll — while the percentage who call it harmful, 19 percent, is at an all-time low.

Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.

After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.

Twitter: @TylerAnbinder

*************************************

Beyond the vileness and lies of Trump’s White Nationalist, racist, xenophobia, Professor Anbinder’s article ends on an upbeat note:

Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.

After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.

Unfortunately, the “upward arc of history” will be too late to save the many individual lives and futures daily destroyed by Trump’s White Nationalist hate campaign.

That’s why the “New Due Process Army” is fighting to save lives and protect the Constitutional, legal, and human rights of everyone.

PWS

11-11-19

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